A kind of reading that doesn’t just describe what happened in a story, but actually performs it. The only way to read the story is to play it, and the only way to play the story is to do it, to completely embody it.

Awe is a kind of surprise that resists pity or cynicism. It is not relative or subjective. It’s an active and dynamic process that cannot be separated from its twin concept, wonder.

Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.

I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it.

I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)

To begin with “klang” is inherently onomatopoetic: you get the primary sound and also its “klang,” you get the signification and its associative resonance. So many of Tranströmer’s poems are about listening, or even living, in a kind of sonic aftermath.

Since a certain amount of funding is potentially coming from grants, donors, and (hopefully) the press’s Board of Directors, there are more variables to consider.

I cry a little, too, because it all feels so cliché. That I should look at my mother and realize she’ll die one day. That she should notice my tears becoming heavenly–sorry, heavy–and approach me, open-armed.

Because the place we’re standing now matters so much less than the ingenious and idiotic ways we managed to get there.

I’d like the work I do to matter somehow, which is all the proof I need that it doesn’t.

It is not uncommon for love to become transactional over time, and for ideals like romance to eventually give way to revenge and hatred.

The pieces in this series find ways to speak into and around awe—often figured as speechlessness, to be dumbfounded—and how its overwhelming facts can run through our lives.

Because the question, as Joudah points out, is not repeatedly being asked: do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and Jewish lives?

& that someone asked the blushed face father will he see him again & he said absolutely absolutely & I thought we are the same

Unlike these other texts of loss, he never settles on one position, the memoir reading like a “revolving door” of these roles: Pathologist, Mad Lover, Investigator, Director, Freudian Psychoanalyst, Diarist.

We have to do so much for you, don’t you see? You play all day while we work so hard.

Can one tell Twain’s story from Jim’s perspective without creating a flimsy, second-hand imitation of Jim’s voice which dooms the experiment from the start?

Each center describes what happens in another center
I’m not a cynic, I’m here

Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand.

It can’t all be true, or as bad as they make it. But there’s no plumb, exactly, for these things.